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How to Set Up Claude Code in VS Code (And Actually Make It Useful)
The setup takes 10 minutes. Getting it to genuinely improve your workflow takes a bit more. Here’s both.
I connected Claude to VS Code, I used it exactly the way I’d been using Copilot. Tab completion, quick code suggestions, the occasional refactor. Fine. Useful. Not transformative.
Then a colleague showed me how she was actually using it and I felt like I’d been driving a sports car in first gear for three months.
There’s a real difference between having Claude available in your editor and having Claude integrated into how you actually work. This piece is about making that second thing happen. The setup is quick. The payoff is in knowing what to do once it’s running.
First: what does “Claude in VS Code” actually mean?
Before getting into setup, worth clarifying what we’re talking about. There are a few different ways to use Claude with VS Code and they’re not the same thing.
⦁ Claude Code (terminal): Anthropic’s own CLI tool. You run it in your terminal, it has full access to your codebase, can read and write files, run commands, and work across multiple files at once. This is the most powerful option and the one I use daily.
